It goes without saying that entrepreneurs know the importance of search engine optimization, and how to boost their Google search rankings. Right? Or is SEO a foreign language that you haven’t quite mastered?

Google rank is critical to a business’s success in this digital age. Savvy entrepreneurs know that search engine optimization is a necessary part of the marketing toolkit — and it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Instead of letting your Google rank get you down, apply these tips and techniques from a group of successful, young entrepreneurs in order to boost your company’s SEO results.

1. Create Evergreen Content

You’ll want your content to take the top slots for your name and various keywords and phrases, so you’ll want to have high-quality, authoritative content. The best way to make sure your content is seen this way to is create content that is forever useful, not trendy and disposable. Create content that people will be reading 10 years from now, and you

It is important for online marketers to create fully optimized landing pages so that users clicking on advertisements are directed to compelling, relevant information that encourages them to interact with the brand.

Mashable interviewed Zach Morrison, vice president of strategy at Elite SEM on best practices for creating landing pages that convert.

Take a look at his thoughts below, and let us know in the comments if you have any questions on improving landing pages.

1. Optimize the Layout & Design for Web Reading

“Eyetracking research studies have shown that there’s an actual science and method to users’ online behavior and how their brains and eyes digest what they’re seeing on the page,” says Morrison. “What this means is that a web user is first drawn to look at the top left of the page and then their eyes follow a diagonal line across the center to the bottom right of the page.”

Morrison suggests placing the company’s logo and the key messages in prime...

The past several months have afforded several high-profile examples of how search engine optimization, or SEO, should not be done. Last fall it was DecorMyEyes and the case of the abusive business proprietor, and just recently it was JCPenney and the case of the short-lived black hat success.

Such stories are by no means the only ones out there, of course--they've just drawn more publicity than most. Either way, examples like these are a rich source of instruction for the rest of us and a good reminder that in SEO--as in so many aspects of life--there's a right way to do things, and there are wrong ones.

Want to improve your company's search rankings? Then make sure you don't try to play any of these dirty SEO tricks.

1. Cloaking Your Content

The No. 1 top offending SEO technique, according to both SEO software firm SEOmoz and Google's own guidelines, is to design your Website so that search engines see one thing while human visitors see another. This is commonly called "cloaking...

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

By Bill Slawski, on November 22, 2010, at 10:39 am

SEO and Keyword Matching

I don’t recall clearly when I first started calling what I do SEO, and I really didn’t have an official title at my first inhouse SEO position back in 1996. I thought of that role as a webmaster, marketing manager, IT department, technical consultant, and did whatever else needed to be done. A friend’s sister worked at Digital Corp, and she sent us an email about a new service they had started called Alta Vista one day.

That’s probably when we first started thinking seriously about search engines, and their potential to help or to harm businesses. When Google came along, we became a lot more serious about search.

Back in the days just before Google started gaining any popularity, when the leading search engines counted amongst their ranks Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos, a paper titled What is a tall poppy among web pages? by Glen Pringle, Lloyd Allison and David L. Dowe explored...